Good Ones are Hard to Find

by HannahLou

Good friends really are hard to find, but maybe not as hard as everybody thinks. My best friend was there for me when nobody else was because nobody else knew exactly how I was feeling.

My grandmother was one of my best friends. Almost three years ago, she passed away. There was some disquiet in our family, and the daughter who lived behind my grandmother’s house (they had a shared driveway) was feuding with my mother. This meant that me and my mother weren’t allowed out there. My grandmother had no say in this as she was in a wheelchair and had a touch of Alzheimer’s. For the last year of my grandmother’s life, I didn’t get to see her very often. I got to say goodbye, but I was crushed when she died.

One night my best friend and I were sitting in his truck, and he asked me about her. I wasn’t even aware that he knew she had passed away, but somehow he knew about it. He told me that he wished he could have met her and told me that it was okay to cry. I of course started bawling my eyes out and he let me cry and snot on his shirt for like an hour. That’s what real friends do, though, when you really need them to be there. He didn’t try to make me feel better with pointless words because he knew there were none that could make me feel any better about her being gone.